The Independent, the UK daily, in an exclusive report by Steve Connor said a section of the super-rich linked to fossil fuel industry back climate crisis deniers. The report headlined “Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science” said: A secretive funding organization in the US that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate "counter movement" to undermine the science of global warming.

A climate scientist who says he has been subjected to a vitriolic hate campaign has denounced the way that American billionaires have been able to secretly finance the climate-skeptic organizations that have attacked him.

Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania University, who has been targeted by climate-change skeptics for his work on global temperature records, said it was wrong for wealthy individuals such as the oil billionaire Charles Koch to surreptitiously finance the “counter-movement” that denounces the science of global warming.

It was only when he was researching a book that he became aware Koch was assisting some of the organizations that he says have been attacking him and his colleagues for so many years, Professor Mann said. He said the skeptic organizations had “single-handedly sought to poison the public discourse over human-caused climate change. In the process they have potentially mortgaged the futures of our children and grandchildren. You couldn’t invent villains like this if you tried.”

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